by Mark Lukens
They all stared at him. Even Ray had stopped pacing for a moment.
“Tracks?” Carla finally asked.
“I don’t see any footprints in the sand out here. No tire tracks. Nothing.”
They all stared at Adam.
“If someone dropped us out here in the middle of the desert,” Adam continued, “then there would be some kind of tracks in the sand.”
CHAPTER THREE
Tony marched out to where Adam stood in the sand. He stared down at the sand like he had to see for himself to believe it. There were no tracks in the sand—nothing as far as he could see.
Eugene watched Tony and Adam for a moment, but then he looked back at the horizon like he could see something shimmering in the distance. He took off his glasses and wiped them carefully on his tie, and then he slipped them back on. After another moment he loosened his tie.
“Maybe the wind blew sand over the tracks,” Carla offered. “Maybe that’s why there aren’t any tracks.”
But even Carla didn’t seem too convinced with her own theory.
Tony barked out sarcastic laughter and snorted in a big sniff of air.
“Not much wind,” Adam said. “A slight breeze is all.”
Tony and Adam walked back towards Beth and Carla.
“So how the hell did someone get us here?” Carla asked.
“It’s like we were dropped down here on the sand,” Beth said in a low voice, and then she shrunk back when she realized everyone was looking at her.
“What do you mean by that?” Tony growled at her.
Beth looked to Carla for help and shook her head no. “I … I don’t know. It just seems that if there aren’t any tracks, then it’s like something dropped us down here on the sand.”
Tony stood in front of Beth and Carla, staring at Beth. “What do you mean?” he pressed. “Like a UFO? Is that what you’re trying to suggest?”
Beth tried to answer, but it felt like her words were stuck in her throat. She just shook her head no.
Carla moved in front of Beth like she was protecting her, shielding her from Tony’s anger. “Or maybe a helicopter or an airplane,” Carla said quickly. “Maybe that’s what she meant.”
“Oh really,” Tony said. “And how does she know that?” Tony eyed Beth. “You know something about all of this?”
Beth shook her head no. “I was just …”
“She’s just trying to help,” Carla finished for her. “None of us know what’s going on. We’re just throwing some guesses out.”
“Well, we shouldn’t make stupid guesses,” Tony grumbled.
“She can say whatever she wants to,” Carla snapped at Tony.
“That’s enough,” Adam said as he stepped in among them. “Standing here arguing with each other isn’t going to help anything.”
Tony turned to Adam. “Oh, you’re the leader now?”
“I’m not trying to be the leader,” Adam said and sighed in exasperation. He was trying to be calm, but even calm men could be pushed too far.
Tony turned away from them. He glanced at Eugene like he might want to start on him next, but Eugene didn’t look his way—he kept his eyes on the horizon like he was watching something.
“Okay,” Adam said. “First things first. We need to find some water. And we’re going to need to find some kind of shelter from the sun.”
Tony looked at Adam. “What do you want to do, build a sand igloo?”
Adam’s eyes locked on Tony for a moment, and he seemed like he was going to snap. But he didn’t. He looked back at Beth and Carla. “I think we should start walking.”
Tony spun around, his arms out, a sarcastic grin on his face. “Pick a direction, old man.”
“What’s your problem?” Adam snapped at Tony.
“What the fuck do you think my problem is?” Tony said and stepped right up to him. “I woke up in the middle of the desert, and I want to know who brought me here.”
“We all want answers, but we have to think about survival first or we’re not going to live long enough to get any questions answered.”
Beth stepped away from Carla, away from Adam and Tony eyeballing each other and standing toe-to-toe. She watched Eugene who was still in the same spot in the sand. After Eugene’s outburst about a man named Frank, he hadn’t said anything else. He just sat in the sand and stared at the horizon.
Like he can see something.
Beth walked over to Eugene and crouched down in the sand beside him. She stared at what Eugene was looking at and she could see it now.
“You guys done yet?” Carla asked Adam and Tony.
Adam and Tony stared each other down.
But Adam was the first to walk away. He glanced at Ray who watched him with hope in his eyes.
“Where do you think we should walk to?” Carla asked Adam.
This time Tony didn’t interrupt.
“I don’t know what time it is,” Adam said as he looked up at the sun. “I’d guess sometime in the middle of the day, maybe early afternoon.” He looked at the mountains in the distance. “I think we should walk towards those mountains. We might find some kind of shelter there. Maybe we’ll even find some pockets of leftover rainwater. A cave. At the very least, we could climb up to a higher elevation and survey the area around us.”
Carla nodded, but then she realized that Beth wasn’t beside her anymore. She looked at Beth who was crouched down beside Eugene. They were both hypnotized by something on the horizon.
She walked towards them, but she could already see what they were staring at before she got to them.
“How come we didn’t see that before?” she whispered.
CHAPTER FOUR
Adam and Tony rushed through the sand to Beth, Carla, and Eugene. Even Ray quit pacing through the sand and followed them.
They all stared at the horizon for a long moment, all of them silent. There was something long and low and dark on the horizon. Not too far away, ten or fifteen miles at the most.
“What do you think it is?” Tony asked. “Some kind of hill, or a group of rocks or something?”
“I don’t think so,” Adam answered. “There are hills beyond that thing. To me it looks … man-made.”
“They look like buildings to me,” Carla said.
Beth nodded but didn’t say anything. They looked like buildings to her, too. And she trusted that Carla probably had the sharpest eyes out of all of them because of her age.
“How come we didn’t see them before?” Adam asked.
“Maybe it’s a mirage,” Tony offered. “You know, like in the cartoons.”
Beth watched the group of objects in the distance. They were shimmering in the heat, almost like they were moving, but even in the movement, she could make out the sharp lines of roofs and buildings. Now that Carla said they looked like buildings, Beth could see them now.
“Maybe it’s someone’s property,” Adam said. “Or maybe even a town.”
“They’ll have water there,” Carla said, getting excited now.
“And a phone,” Tony added.
Eugene got to his feet without a word and brushed the sand off of his clothes and started walking towards the buildings.
“What’s his problem?” Carla whispered at the others.
Tony looked at both Carla and Adam: he spoke to them in a low, conspiratorial voice. “I’m telling you, there’s something about that guy. He’s got something to do with all of this. I’d bet you my paycheck on that.”
“Hell with it,” Carla said with a smile. “Let’s get walking.”
CHAPTER FIVE
There was an excitement within the group as they walked through the sand towards the dark objects in the distance. It was something to walk towards, something to hope for. If they couldn’t figure out who brought them here, then at least they could find some food and water, and some relief from the relentless sun.
Even with the buzz of excitement, they walked a lot of the way in silence. It was a strange situation, Beth
thought. What could they really talk about? They didn’t know each other. They didn’t really trust each other. They didn’t know why they had been dropped off in the middle of the desert. They couldn’t remember anything about how they got here. They were stressed out and tired, and all they wanted to do was get to those buildings and find a way home.
Home? Did she really want to go back home?
Beth felt something digging into the flesh of her thigh in her front pocket as she walked. She let her fingers brush over the pocket and it felt like there was a small metal object tucked down inside it. She didn’t take the object out as she walked. She didn’t have anything else in her pockets that she could tell—no money, no keys, just the small, rectangle object digging at her skin a little as she walked.
She thought about asking the others if they had anything on them: wallets, money, keys. But she didn’t ask. She didn’t want to speak up, and she was pretty sure that whoever left them in the middle of the desert took their wallets, IDs, money, cell phones and anything else they had on them.
They didn’t hurt us or kill us, she thought to herself. They just left us here.
Beth’s mind wandered back to the last thing she could remember.
She had been in their trailer home. It was always wreck—no matter how much she tried to clean up behind her husband, he would just trash the place again. Her memories seemed a little fuzzy about last night, and her head hurt a little trying to think about it, but she remembered him yelling at her.
“You trying to tell me what I can and can’t do?” he had screamed at her.
He was close to her face in her memory. His breath smelled like alcohol. He’d already been sipping from a bottle of Jim Beam all day.
She’d tried to tell him that she wasn’t telling him what he could and couldn’t do. But he never gave her a chance to explain.
He punched her in the stomach, and then he punched her in the face twice—two quick punches that she never saw coming because she’d been doubled over from the pain in her abdomen.
Beth squeezed her eyes shut for a moment as she walked. She didn’t want to think about it, she didn’t want to relive what had happened. But if she didn’t think about it, then she wouldn’t be able to remember how she got here. And for some reason, she felt like she needed to try and make herself remember, like there was an important clue in her foggy memory, something hidden that she needed to recall—and soon.
Like her life depended on it.
CHAPTER SIX
They all stopped walking when they were a hundred yards away from the buildings, they didn’t need to be any closer to tell that it wasn’t someone’s property or a thriving small town or anything else—it was just an abandoned town.
A ghost town.
Beth heard the dejected exhalations from the others. She could nearly feel their disappointment permeating her mind.
The closer they got to the town, the firmer the ground had become, turning from soft sand to hard-baked clay with cracks that spider-webbed along the surface. There were more rocks and gravel scattered across the sand. And there was more vegetation, but it was mostly cacti and scraggly, thorny plants—all grayish brown with no real color, like the desert heat had sapped all moisture out of them.
“Great,” Tony spat out. “We walked ten miles to find a ghost town.”
Adam wiped sweat from his brow and glanced around at the others. “Listen, guys. I know a ghost town sucks, but at least it will give us some shelter from the sun and from the cold at night. It gets cold in the desert at night.”
“Yeah, some shelter, that’s good,” Carla said, “but what about food and water? And how are we supposed to get back home?”
“Maybe there’s some water in this town somewhere,” Adam answered. “Maybe some leftover rainwater collected somewhere. We’ll have to look.” But he didn’t sound too hopeful.
“There’s a sign over there,” Carla said and she was already walking towards a wooden sign a hundred feet away, not waiting for anyone else.
They followed Carla.
Carla stood in front of the sign at the side of a gravelly strip that used to be the road into this town a long time ago. The sign was crafted from a large piece of wood that had petrified and turned a grayish color; it was split in several places from years of relentless heat. Large rusty nails fastened the sign to a pair of wooden posts driven deep down into the hard-packed ground.
“Welcome to Paradise,” Adam said as he read the sign from behind Carla. The words had been etched into the wood sign ages ago.
“Yeah,” Tony grumbled. “This is paradise all right.” He kicked at some loose gravel.
“Is that blood?” Carla whispered and crouched down at the bottom of the sign.
Beth saw the four long smudges that Carla was talking about. She didn’t know if it was blood, but the smudges definitely looked like they’d been made by human fingers.
Carla brushed at one of the smudges with her finger. “It’s dry,” she said and then stood up and looked at the others. “It looks like blood to me.”
Ray shifted from one foot to the other like he had a hard time standing still, but at least he had stopped mumbling about how thirsty he was.
Beth didn’t need any reminders about thirst: her throat was so dry it felt like her tongue was going to permanently stick to the roof of her mouth and her throat was going to close up completely.
“Come on, let’s get out of the sun for a little while,” Adam said to everyone.
They walked the rest of the way to the town and stopped at the edge of it. They stared for a moment at the row of wood buildings that lined each side of the dusty road that ran straight through the middle of the town. Most of the buildings were two stories high, but a few of them had a third story. The buildings were squeezed in close to each other, some separated by a narrow alley, and others built right up tight to the next building. A wood deck ran along the fronts of the buildings on both sides of the street; some of the walkways had wooden awnings built over them. There were ten buildings on each side of the road, no other buildings anywhere except for at the far end of town—a white church that the dusty main street of the town ran right up to.
All of the buildings were constructed of wood—the same petrified grayish wood that the sign was made of. Some of the buildings looked like they had been painted at one time, but most of the paint had peeled away decades ago. All of the windows were dark, and they were all intact. No broken windows. Not even a crack in any of the glass panes.
The buildings looked neglected, Beth thought. But the windows looked newer than the buildings. And that seemed strange to her. Another thing she found strange was that even though the buildings were neglected, the church at the far end of the street looked like it had been taken care of, maybe even recently painted with bright, white paint. It seemed to her like someone was in the process of restoring this ghost town, and that gave her a slight hope that they might find help here.
Somebody’s here, Beth’s mind whispered to her. Somebody has to be here.
And Beth had a weird feeling that this place was somehow familiar to her. But she couldn’t put her finger on it; she couldn’t force her mind to remember, almost like a part of her mind was fighting the memories, holding them back for some reason.
For your protection, that voice whispered in her mind again.
She didn’t know where that thought had come from and she pushed it from her mind. She didn’t want the others to know that this place seemed familiar to her. She didn’t want them to be suspicious of her, especially Tony who seemed to think every one of them were involved with this.
Adam stared in awe at the buildings. “This place looks like it was ripped right out of an Old West movie.” He pointed at the building to their right. “Look at those posts over there. They look like hitching posts for horses. This town has to be over a hundred years old.”
Some of the buildings had weathered signs hanging down from the wooden awnings in front of them. Most
of the signs were too faded to read, but a building on their right, about halfway down the row of buildings, had a sign dangling from the edge of the wood awning that was still easy to read: HOTEL.
“Hello?!” Tony shouted, startling all of them, especially Beth. Hearing a man shout caused her to shrink back with fear—it was an automatic reaction for her these days.
They all looked at Tony who had moved a few paces away from their group. He spun around in a slow circle, looking up at the second and third story windows. “Hello?! Is there anyone here?!”
There were no replies and no flashes of movement behind the dark windows.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be doing that,” Eugene said.
They all looked at Eugene.
“Doing what?” Tony asked him.
“Shouting. Maybe whoever brought us out here to the desert is in this town right now.”
Tony walked over to Eugene. “What makes you think that?”
“Because there has to be a reason we were dropped in the desert near this ghost town.”
“You know something about this, don’t you?” Tony sneered at him.
“I’m just being logical. People don’t do things without a reason. They wanted us to find this place.”
“Good,” Tony said. “I want them to come out and face us. I want to know why we’re here.”
Tony didn’t give Eugene a chance to respond, he walked away from him and started shouting again.
Carla watched Eugene. “You don’t hardly say two words this whole time, and now you think we were meant to come to this town.”
Eugene shrugged as he stared at her through his round glasses. “I like to do less talking and more thinking.”
Carla flared up with anger, but Adam stepped in quickly.
“Come on, guys,” he said. “We don’t need to argue. Let’s just check this place out.”
“It’s scary here,” Ray said as he gazed up at the buildings.
“I know, it is kind of creepy,” Adam said, “but at least it’s some kind of shelter where we can rest.”
